“You certainly show your liking by your knowledge.  I thought every schoolboy knew the cuckoo-flower!” cried Adelaide, trying to seem natural and not bitter in her banter, and not succeeding.

“I can learn.  Never too late to mend, you know.  And Miss Dundas shall teach me,” said Edgar.

“I do not know enough:  I cannot teach you,” Leam answered, taking him literally.

“My dear Leam, how frightfully literal you are!” said Adelaide.  “Do you think it looks pretty?  Do you really believe that Major Harrowby was in earnest about your giving him botanical lessons?”

“I believe people I respect,” returned Leam gravely.

“Thanks,” said Edgar warmly, his face flushing.

Adelaide’s face flushed too.  “Are you going through life taking as gospel all the unmeaning badinage which gentlemen permit themselves to talk to ladies?” she asked from the heights of her superior wisdom.  “Remember, Leam, at your age girls cannot be too discreet.”

“I do not understand you,” said Leam, fixing her eyes on the fair face that strove so hard to conceal the self within from the world without, and to make impersonal and aphoristic what was in reality passionate disturbance.

“A girl who has been four years at a London boarding-school not to understand such a self-evident little speech as that!” cried Adelaide, with well-acted surprise.  “How can you be insincere?  I must say I have no faith, myself, in Bayswater ingenues:  have you, Edgar?” with the most graceful little movement of her head, her favorite action, and one that generally made its mark.

“I do not understand you,” said Leam again.  “I only know that you are rude:  you always are.”

She spoke in her most imperturbable manner and with her quietest face.  Nothing roused in her so much the old Leam of pride and disdain as these encounters with Adelaide Birkett.  The two were like the hereditary foes of old-time romance, consecrated to hate from their birth upward.

“Come, come, fair lady, you are rather hard on our young friend,” said Edgar with a strange expression in his eyes—­angry, intense, and yet uncertain.  He wanted to protect Leam, yet he did not want to offend Adelaide; and though he was angry with this last, he did not wish her to see that he was.

“Dear Leam!  I am sure she is very sweet and nice,” breathed Josephine; but little Fina, playing with Josephine’s chatelaine, said in her childish treble, “No, no, she is not nice:  she is cross, and never laughs, and she has big eyes.  They frighten me at night, and then I scream.  Your are far nicer, Missy Joseph.”

Adelaide laughed outright; Josephine was embarrassed between the weak good-nature that could not resist even a child’s caressing words and her constitutional pain at giving pain; Edgar tried to smile at the little one’s pertness as a thing below the value of serious notice, while feeling all that a man does feel when the woman whom he loves is in trouble and he cannot defend her; but Leam herself said to the child, gravely and without bitterness, “I am not cross, Fina, and laughing is not everything.”